Chicken Soup for the Soul: Hooked on Hockey: 101 Stories about the Players Who Love the Game and the Families that Cheer Them On

Fresh Air & Ice

The Dawn Patrol

Winter must be cold for those with no warm memories.

~From the movie An Affair to Remember

In the frigid glow of dawn, seated on stumps around the remains of the previous night’s bonfire, we laced on our skates. Then we sat hunched, toques pulled low over our ears, warming our numbed fingers above the embers, awaiting sunrise.

The Credit River emptied into Lake Ontario just west of Toronto. In the 1960s, it froze solid. Parks and Recreation staff plowed the snow from its surface and re-flooded it nightly, creating a public skating rink that stretched for miles. A mecca for pleasure skaters and shinny players of all ages, who came to enjoy nature’s beauty and bounty. Fires were built along the banks to warm them and coloured lights were strung from shore to shore to add ambiance at night. Thousands spent their afternoons and evenings enjoying the ice.

This was our time. We were the dawn patrol.

As the sun began to creep above the horizon, my friend Bill and I would slip our hands into our hockey gloves, take up our sticks and abandon the fire. Clumping our way through the bulrushes and shell ice to the river’s edge we paused, poised for the moment. Then the first golden rays would strike, unveiling an unblemished sheet of glistening blue-white ice, stretching farther than our eyes could see. The invitation to fly on our booted blades of silver steel had been issued.

A few short strokes to test balance and edge, then with longer more powerful strides, our blades began carving the virgin ice, leaving a trail of diamond chips in our wake. No boards to confine us, no blue lines to restrain us; we challenged imaginary opponents, deking them with our best moves, turning, spinning, stopping, starting and winning every time.

The sub-zero nights made river ice very hard and this, combined with the water flowing just a foot beneath our skates, created a distinct hollow sound each time our blades cut into it. We were breathing hard now as the frigid air tugged at our lungs, but we warmed to the task.

The first puck dropped. It was game on. No coaches, no officials and no line-changes, just the two of us, skating side by side, exchanging short passes, getting the feel. Then, Go Bill! and I would fire a long lead pass challenging him to snare it. He in turn would test my mettle. If we missed a few, no matter — our rink was endless and our energy boundless. We had but one rule. Follow the fresh ice.

Full sunlight now and the reflection from the gleaming surface made our eyes water as we skated leisurely up river, on patrol, still sliding passes, backhand, forehand, sharp or soft and then suddenly, Dump and chase! Bill firing the puck straight up river and the race was on. Impossibly, that skittering black disk seemed to gain speed, as with heads down, legs driving and sticks extended, we vied to be first to snare it.

Crack! The sound of a shot? No, just ice and sunlight interacting, and magically a fissure appeared in our rink. A two-inch wide crack opened at our feet and ran from shore to shore. It was the first of many that would form as the day unfolded, and one of the hazards of river skating. We glided on, passing the central bonfire area where the general public would soon begin to intrude on our sanctuary.

Then in the distance we saw a familiar figure moving rapidly toward us: a fellow pathfinder who shared our passion, but in a different way. Hunched forward, arms clasped behind his back, balanced on incredibly long blades, a speed skater approached. Freed from the endless circles and crossovers of competition, his powerful legs drove him forward at remarkable speed and he flew past us. We lifted our sticks in salute; he nodded without breaking form. He would return and pass us again before we reached our goal.

Our destination was the end of the fresh ice. It was our passion to leave our mark from beginning to end of that wonderful rink and we always did. We knew during our downriver return, as we added to the cuts and curves we had already made, that the magic spell of being first comers, of it being our ice and ours alone, would be soon broken.

The families were gathering near the fires, preparing to join us, and groups of shinny players were starting pickup games. We would play in several as we trekked back downriver.

When we reached our starting point we had to search to find our boots, now mixed amongst scores of other pairs, left by those who came later. As we sat warming them over the fire, readying them to accept our tingling toes, we often got strange quitting so soon? comments or looks from those just lacing up. Bill and I would just smile, hang our skates on our sticks and shoulder them for the walk home.

Little did they know! We would return on the morrow, in the darkest hour, to repeat our ritual. We were the dawn patrol.

~John Forrest

Playing Shinny on Macamley Street

Growing up, if I hadn’t had sports, I don’t know where I’d be. God only knows what street corners I’d have been standing on and God only knows what I’d have been doing, but instead I played hockey and went to school and stayed out of trouble.

~Bobby Orr

We didn’t have ice skates or an ice rink, but we kids were blessed by the gods of hockey with the perpetually snow covered streets of south Buffalo winters. Heck, we had taped up hockey sticks, a puck (sometimes a tin can), and goals marked with old sneakers. What else did we need? We played with heart and a passion known only to eleven-year-old boys crazy in love with the game of hockey.

It was the mid-forties. Our Buffalo Bisons hockey team, American League farm club of the legendary Montreal Canadiens NHL team, was burning up their league. Buffalo won the coveted Calder Cup several times in the forties.

We kids listened to every game on the radio (no TV yet) and would take turns sharing tear sheets from the sports pages of the Buffalo Courier-Express newspaper. We’d pore over the stats of each game at school. Did Pargeter get the hat trick last night? Wow! That’s twice this month already.

My best pals — Dave Murph Murphy and Bones Miller — along with Don, Bernie and myself were the hard-nosed ones. We played when Macamley Street was slick with ice or loaded with two feet of snow. We played in the sleet and the rain and right through some of Buffalo’s biggest snow squalls. Bring it on. We were ready.

Our uniforms were jeans, winter coats and earmuffs. Playing in our overshoes, we didn’t look much like hockey players but we played with the intensity of pros, right through the icy winds that blew off Lake Erie and the black and blue hurts on our shins. We checked our opponents into the snow banks that lined Macamley Street. The only local rule we observed, in deference to our complete lack of protective gear, was no lifting the puck.

The only time we stopped playing was when a car made its way down the street and we had to pause to let it go by. Otherwise, our games went on for hours or until the street lights went on. That was our signal to call the game and return to the mundane world of family life, homework and cleaning up for dinner.

Two or three times a season, our gang managed to get the money together to take the bus downtown to see the Bisons play at Memorial Auditorium. We lived for those days. The Aud, as we called it, was a first-class indoor sports arena with seating for about 12,000 fans. We could only afford the cheap seats so we sat way up in the higher regions of the auditorium, but we felt lucky just being part of the raucous crowd cheering on our beloved Bisons.

Just before the breaks between periods of the games, we would hustle down from the cheap seats to the lower floor where the teams had their locker rooms to catch our team coming off the ice. Just to see our heroes up close was a thrill. Sometimes, we’d get brave and yell out our encouragement: Hey, Al way to go or Nice game, Pargeter. If we were rewarded by so much as a grunt from one of the players, we felt graced by the Almighty.

But nothing prepared us for the time one of the Buffalo players came off the ice carrying a hockey stick that had a crack in the shaft. He apparently had just noticed the crack and was about to hand it to the manager for disposal. I was right there in front of him. Summoning up all the courage I had in my eleven-year-old body, I said, Can I have it? The player looked down at me for a second. Sure kid, it’s yours. He thrust it into my waiting hands. It was a miracle. I had a real professional hockey stick.

Oh My Gosh! Dave and Bones crowded around me. He GAVE it to you? exclaimed Bones. Wow! Are you lucky. Everything was a blur after that. We watched the final period of the game but I was lost in a haze of unexpected good fortune. My hands clutched the stick tightly, but my soul was already in paradise.

We played shinny again at home but it didn’t take long for the already-damaged stick to break into two pieces. I taped it up the best I could and kept it for a while in the cellar of our house on Macamley Street. All too soon, our hockey crazy period ended as we grew into adolescence and went our separate ways to different high schools in the Buffalo area. Eventually, the Buffalo Bisons morphed into the Sabres of the National Hockey League. Alas, I find myself living in California now, far from the snowy streets of south Buffalo.

Ah, but the memories remain.

~Hank Mattimore

Watch Out for the Diving Board!

If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older.

~Tom Stoppard

Chip. Chip. Chip.

My dad — brandishing a long, heavy spud bar — lorded over a tiny hole in the ice on the northwest corner of our farm pond.

Chip. Chip. Chip.

With each downward stroke of the spud bar, the hole in the ice grew a little bigger.

Chip. Chip. Chip.

Three of my brothers and I knelt around the hole, eyeing the progress.

Looking up, I asked Now Dad?

No, John, not yet, he replied.

Chip. Chip. Chip.

Eventually, my dad stopped cutting the ice with the spud bar. Then he knelt down next to the hole and stuck his bare hand into the freezing water.

We watched him grope around.

I repeated, Now Dad?

Yep, he returned. The ice is thick enough for you boys to go onto the pond.

Whoo Hoo!

That was all we needed to hear.

Four boys leapt up and ran to the tool barn. Our next task was to remove the snow from the top of the ice. Of course, the fact that we only owned two snow shovels didn’t deter us. Joe and Jeff grabbed those two snow shovels and ran straight to the pond. Standing side by side, they began traipsing across the surface, pushing snow to the side. Being older, Jerry and I grabbed two benches from the picnic table. Laying them on their sides, we pushed those benches across the ice, cutting a swath in the snow that was twice as wide as that of the snow shovels. Within an hour, the four of us had cleared a rough, rectangular rink that was so large the swimming board on our dock protruded into the playing area. But that was okay . . . we would just remain vigilant so as to not skate into it.

Next, Joe ran into the house to get all the hockey sticks and our puck, while Jerry and I continued to set up the rink. The picnic benches that we had used as snow plows would now double as our goals. Again laying them on their sides, Jerry and I placed the picnic benches at each end of the rectangle.

Next, three of us returned to the tool barn, for up in the mow was a metallic box that contained our skates. But therein laid the rub — there wasn’t a single pair of hockey skates in the box. Instead, they were all hand-me-down figure skates! Some were even white, having been given to us by our Aunt. We didn’t care — skates were skates. We wrestled that metallic box down — being careful to not hit Dad’s lawnmower — and placed it on the snow in front of the tool barn.

About that time, Mom opened the back door and stepped onto the house’s back deck, yelling Boys?

Yeah, Mom?

Aunt Betty is bringing over Dave and Dan.

Whoo Hoo!

My cousins David and Daniel were the same ages as Jerry and I, and lived a short ten minutes away. They would give us enough boys to play three-on-three.

About that time, Joe returned with a hodge-podge mixture of hockey sticks that we had purchased over the years from Ace Hardware in town. Wanting to look like professional hockey players, we had wrapped black tape around the blades and also rigged a black knob on the end with the same tape. Joe also had our puck, which we had placed in Mom’s freezer — much to her objection.

Joe laid everything down, and immediately eight hands began rummaging through the metallic box for skates that would fit. Right there in the snow we sat down, kicked off our boots, and put those figure skates on over white athletic socks. Blisters be damned!

As we stood erect on figure skates for the first time since last winter, Aunt Betty’s Rambler pulled into our gravel driveway and parked. My aunt exited the car and went into the house to visit with her sister, but Dave and Dan bolted straight toward our outdoor locker room.

Dave and Dan sat down in the snowy spots that we had just vacated, only to see that the white figure skates were the only ones left.

After Dave and Dan donned their skates, the six of us walked to our makeshift rink, reviewing the standard ground rules of farm pond hockey:

1. Since we had no referee, there would be no opening face-off. Instead, we would toss a coin to determine which team got the puck first. Then, the losing three would simply throw the puck down the ice to the winning three to start the game . . . like a football kick-off.

2. In three-on-three pond hockey, there was no goalie.

3. Likewise, there was no penalty box. We obeyed the rules.

4. When the puck got whacked onto land, the first player to skate there, run up on the snow, and retrieve it received a free start at the point where the puck exited the ice.

5. If anyone was skating with the puck down the north side of the rink, it was a common courtesy to yell, Watch out for the diving board!

~John M. Scanlan

The Endless Rink

Ice hockey players can walk on water.

~Author Unknown

I grew up in the far reaches of northern New York State in a little hamlet comprised of ten houses, a church and a one-room schoolhouse. I have fond memories of an idyllic youth spent playing in the woods, biking for miles on country roads and spending hours exploring the shores of a brook at the bottom of the hill behind our house.

Especially the brook. It was a playground and oasis that served our youthful needs for all four seasons. In the spring, it was the place to build dams to reroute the fast-moving water. In the summer, it was a berth for our series of homemade rafts, only one of which, if memory serves me well, could actually float with one of us standing on it.

The fall was a time for quiet reflection by the brook. We would wile away hours traveling up and down its banks and play Pooh sticks on the narrow bridge that carried the small blacktop road up the hill to our hamlet.

But the best time of all at the brook was winter. As Christmas approached and the temperature dropped, my brother and I eagerly awaited the formation of the first layer of ice. By January, the ice was thick enough to skate on and that’s what we did, every chance we got.

On weekends, our friends and us raced down the long hill behind our house with skates, hockey sticks and shovels in hand. For it was almost always necessary to shovel snow from the surface to make our own private hockey rink.

Once the rink was cleared, we struggled with frozen fingers to lace up our skates. Two pairs of discarded boots served as makeshift goal posts for our rink of dreams. Hockey sticks that had earlier been stuck upside down in the piled up snow were now retrieved and pucks were dropped so everyone could play.

Eventually we would break into two teams and play a pickup game until the score became too lopsided or the sun was too far below the horizon to see the puck anymore. The score was often secondary; the joy was in playing the game.

When we finally stopped for the day, we could feel our toes tingling as we took off our skates. We trudged back up the hill and into our warm house, our cheeks glowing like embers, our damp hair flattened against our foreheads and our bodies enveloped in fatigue.

As the winter progressed, our rink would become more sophisticated as we added makeshift nets and carved out seats from the snow banks. If we had ever figured out how to string up lights and run a 500-foot extension cord, we surely would have continued to play well into the night.

Sadly, the rink’s days were numbered. If we were lucky, we would continue to shovel off the next snowfall and continue playing. But if we faced freezing rain or a quick thaw, our rink would disappear for days or weeks at a time.

We knew our outdoor hockey season was short, which is why, I guess, we made the most of it. We packed in as many games as we could.

And once in a while, there would be a magical occurrence on our brook. Every few winters, we would be treated to a huge midwinter melt that swallowed up all the snow and was quickly followed by a flash freeze that turned our little brook into a clear perfect ice surface from shore to shore.

On those magical days, there were no makeshift nets or pairs of boots doubling as goal posts. We simply skated on our smooth glassy brook as far and as long as we wanted to, passing a puck back and forth until we finally had to turn around and skate home.

I remember the days of morning-to-night hockey with fondness. But there’s a special spot in my memory reserved for those few magical days when we skated on our own endless rink.

~David Martin

Uncle!

October is not only a beautiful month but marks the precious yet fleeting overlap of hockey, baseball, basketball, and football.

~Jason Love

I was one fortunate kid, let me tell you. Growing up in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, we never worried about traffic jams, unless you counted the deer crossing areas, or the occasional lineups to buy pastries at the Finnish bakery. The air was clear, the lakes cool and clean, and the scenery spectacular. If it weren’t for the mosquitoes, you would have thought you had already made it to heaven.

Summers were spent playing baseball, and winters belonged to basketball. I loved those two sports with a passion that couldn’t be matched, and spent many a day as the hero of my imaginary teams. And then one winter my father dug a hole in our back yard.

What’s Dad up to? I asked Mom on a cold November day. He had borrowed a backhoe and was digging a very large hole behind our house.

He decided he wants to put in an ice rink for the winter, she explained, with a bit of a sigh.

Well, my father never did anything small. This rink was nearly the size of a stadium facility, or at least if looked like that to my eight-year-old eyes. Dad got the volunteer fire department to come out and flood the area, and we had one of the biggest patches of ice short of Lake Superior. Coincidentally, that Christmas Santa brought us all skates as presents.

After getting over the initial wobbles (and cutting open my brother’s lip with my blade on a bad fall), I started to really like the rink. Then Dad came home with some hockey sticks and a puck, and a new winter sport was born in our family. I found that this was not only a lot of fun, but using the stick really helped out my beginner’s balance on the skates. I loved hockey!

But alas, basketball beckoned. My little town was crazy about basketball — even won two state titles back in the fifties — and there wasn’t a local hockey team to be found within reasonable driving distance. So the hockey gear was stuffed into the back of my closet, and rarely considered. The ice rink was eventually filled back in, and my father moved on to building a ski lift down our back hill, which is a story for another day.

Years passed, and I went away to college. It wasn’t until I arrived at Michigan Tech that I learned that they had won the NCAA Hockey Championship the previous year. I guess you could say that the locals and students were a bit excited. I didn’t have a choice — once again hockey ruled the day! My roommate turned out to be a raving lunatic of a hockey fan, and he introduced me to the finer art of his own pre-game warm-up. We would stand behind the net and shove our faces against the glass, and as the practice shots ricocheted off the glass next to our heads, we tried to see who could last the longest without flinching.

Man, did I ever love going to those hockey games! We had a great scorer on the team named Zuke, and my favorite fan sign read, Jesus Saves. But Zuke scores on the rebound! Once our archrivals came to town, and a huge brawl broke out before the puck even dropped to start the game. It was the most incredible fight I ever witnessed. The officials just let them go at it until they all finally got too tired to keep swinging their arms. Everyone was fighting — even the goalies were pummeling each other. Well, as much as two men in all that protective gear could actually pummel. And once again, I loved hockey!

Then life happened, and I moved away from my beloved Michigan once I graduated from college. In Denver, the Broncos and football ruled the sports scene. Later, in Salt Lake City, it was the Jazz and the NBA. Hockey? Forget it!

Then I did something I never imagined in my life. I married a Canadian! And once again, hockey came back into my life, this time for good.

Looking back, it seems that each time I shoved hockey aside in my life, it found a way to creep back in. Now I stand up and scream like a crazy man, especially watching the Stanley Cup. I love the action, intensity and grace of the game. I love the speed, passing, checking, penalties, pain, fighting, scoring and winning. Yes, I’m an American with little experience playing the game, but I sure can appreciate the incredible skill of those who do.

So hockey, to you I say Uncle. As much as I tried to ignore you and put you out of my life, you kept coming back, again and again. And for that, I thank you. Baseball? Too long and slow. Basketball? It’s okay. But hockey? Now you’re talking. Drop that puck and let ’er rip! What could be more wonderful?

I wonder what my wife would say if I start digging up her flower beds this fall?

~Bruce Mills

Backyard Games

My father used to play with my brother and me in the yard.

Mother would come out and say, You’re tearing up the grass.